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American society is obsessed with image. After all, perception is
reality, right? Well, not necessarily when it relates to your
company’s presence on social
media. When businesses, celebrities and the neighbor down the
street are all in a competitive fight for internet attention,
it’s tough to separate the truly popular from the seriously
“followed.” While social media can be a blessing for many
companies when it comes to online branding and marketing, it can
bring the curse of inauthenticity.

Corporations reside in a world of phoneys. With carefully crafted
images and clever marketing messages, a smaller business can
present itself as just as viable an option for a consumer as one
of the giant corporations that may already dominate its industry.
With a wise investment in social-media
marketing, a small company has the potential to compete with
much larger firms.

One of the biggest advantages of social-media spending is the
chance to positively influence the perceptions of prospective
customers. Ultimately, this could lead to increased sales and a
larger relationship between the business and the customer. In a
rush to reap the benefits, however, some companies have become
too greedy. Thus, the “fake” fan, follower and "like" were born.

Introducing the click farm. In their haste to
capitalize, companies have been shortsighted, thinking they need
their online presence to rival that of the competition's. While
matching the numbers of fans, followers or likes of a particular
brand may look great on paper (or the screen), it can be
counterproductive. Despite this, manufacturing and inflating
these numbers has become a big business. Case in point: the
“click farm.”

For a relatively inexpensive price, group of people paid to click
will rapidly boost the number of likes or followers of a brand’s
social-media pages. The jump in numbers can be massive. Imagine a
company's fans spiking from 10,000 to 100,000 overnight. Sounds
great, but there’s a catch.

A purchased fan does nothing to facilitate the growth of a brand.
A successful social-media campaign thrives on audience
engagement. A user’s willingness to comment and share what a
company has to say or offer is what multiplies sales
opportunities. The life cycle of a message is born when a person
shares or comments. From there, the original fan’s friends see
the message and may follow suit and share or comment, which then
allows friends of friends to do so, with the potential for this
to mushroom exponentially. When the audience isn’t real and
consists of fake profiles and bots, the life cycle doesn’t even
have a chance to begin.

If social media has become the digital version of word-of-mouth,
what is the value of a bot without an actual voice? People are
sharing product and service recommendations online every minute
of every day. A key component for spreading the word is that the
dialogue occurs between two or more parties. If a majority of a
company's fans don’t truly exist, neither will its ability to
capitalize on the size of the crowd purportedly following it. A
ghost profile cannot help spread the word about a company.

Spending money on these phantoms does nothing to grow a business.

Companies and marketers alike can now quantify return on
investment on their social-media efforts (though such assessments
once were a challenge), but diluting the numbers with followers
that do not exist muddles these efforts. Computing levels of
engagement and how much activity is being converted into sales
becomes an impossible task when a portion of a company's fans do
not exist. As these click farms have become savvier with how they
create inflated fan bases, the social-media platforms are
catching on. Twitter and Instagram, in particular, conduct purges
of suspicious accounts, which leads to large fluctuations in the
number of followers.

Even worse, certain platforms may delete the account of an
offender entirely. One does not need an MBA to figure out that
this is bad for business.

Think twice about shelling out dollars to swell numbers. Be
careful about choosing to do business with a click farm.
Companies reap what they sow.